“I’d better get to class,” I said. “I’m already late.”
“Let me write you a pass,” he said.
I followed him into his classroom. He fished around in a cluttered desk drawer and found a blank pass. “Are you sure you don’t want to stick around and see what’s in the crate? It will only be a couple of minutes. Besides, I could use your help in getting the sculpture out.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” I said.
He went into the hall and helped Mr. Teller put the crate on the dolly. They wheeled it into a corner and lifted the crate onto the floor. “Thanks, Mr. Teller,” Mr. Devon said. “Thanks for having the brains in this operation.”
Mr. Teller left and Mr. Devon started opening the crate. “So what do you think about football?” he asked me.
“I like it,” I said.
“You ever thought about coming out for the team?”
“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”
“A little, but we don’t have our first game until next week. There’s plenty of season left. You should give it a try. We could use you.”
“Where?” I said. I doubted that they could use me.
“I was thinking in the secondary. Cornerback, maybe.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, think about it. Or better yet, come to a practice. Just watch. See if you like what you see, and then decide. I bet you’d be good at it.”
I actually believed him. Despite my better knowledge of my capabilities and talents, I believed him. I showed up for practice and got my gear—helmet; pads; jersey with number 45 on it, in home and away colors—got my locker, and was out on the field, running drills. I had to borrow a pair of cleats for the first practice, and had my mom go out and buy them the next day. She drove up during practice and handed them to me on the sidelines of the field. But that was later.
Mr. Devon got the lid off the crate. He lifted out a bunch of packing material, under which the sculpture was wrapped in a gray blanket. We reached in and lifted it carefully out onto the floor. Mr. Devon unwrapped it and then stepped back to look. He stood where he could see the sculpture and me at the same time.
It was abstract, a suggestion of something. It was a big bulb of a grotesque blob on a stem, the shape of a head without any of the features of a face, or rather the features torn off in bits and then put back in all the wrong places. That’s what emerged out of the gray stone, almost like concrete: a torn face, grimacing, like someone being tortured or in the dentist’s chair. Or the way I imagined I was going to look during my first game of football. There were too many misshapen surfaces, globs of stone obscuring detail and anything recognizable, until it was just a creepy blob, but you could feel the tension in it, the struggle or violence. It was vague and powerful, and disturbing. I didn’t think anyone would like it sitting there in Mr. Devon’s classroom.
“What’s it called?” I asked.
“Host.”
“Is that your ‘Do not disturb’ sign?”
“You think it’s frightening enough?”
“It’s a little creepy,” I admitted. “Unsettling.”
“What if I told you that some people see it as happy, as exciting or joyful?”
The minute he said it, the object looked different. He suggested it, sure, but the thing did look different now, not menacing or violent, but like something contorted from a laugh, maybe. I could see it.
“Okay,” I said. “Which is it?”
He shrugged. “I just made it. I don’t know what it is. Here’s your pass.” He handed me the yellow slip of paper and I headed off to class.
“Thanks for your help,” he called after me. “And I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Have you ever been drunk?” Anna asked me. We were sitting on the couch in the basement, listening to the shortwave. Her parents had gone out to dinner, which meant that they would be gone a few hours. It was at least a fifteen-minute drive to the nearest restaurant.
“I’ve never had the chance,” I said.
“You’re in for a treat, then.” She went to the wall of stacked boxes and dug efficiently until she pulled out a bottle of vodka. “Straight up or in something?”
“I’d better have it mixed with something.”
She went upstairs and came back with a jug of cranberry juice and two tall glasses with ice. She filled the glasses about a third with vodka and then topped it off with cranberry juice. “Try this,” she said.
It was like drinking something too cold that makes your brain freeze for a second or two. The force of it tapped the inside of my forehead and made me alert, opening my senses. I drank some more, and that initial sensation disappeared. Now it was just cranberry-juice taste.
“What do you think?” she asked me.
“It’s good,” I said.
“Can you feel it? Can you taste it? Can you tell that it’s going to change everything?”
“Not really. Let me try some straight.”
She held the bottle in front of her, waving it at me, teasing. She came and sat on my legs, facing me. She leaned into me and kissed me until my lips and tongue were tingling and numb. “You have to know,” she said, “that the world is never more perfect than when you’re drunk. It’s perfect.” It was perfect. The way she smelled and tasted and felt. The way her hair fell into my face as she leaned over me, dimming the lights behind her, the way the shortwave crackled quietly in the background, repeating its code like a chorus of some song somebody must know somewhere. It was all perfect. She tilted my head back slightly and held the bottle to my lips. It tasted bad, overpowering, but I didn’t mind. She kissed me again and then took a drink of her own.
“So what was it that attracted you to me?” I asked her. I would never have been able to ask her that sober.
“You just seemed so plain and normal that I thought you needed a little weirdness in your life,” she said.
I left before her parents came home, and as I made my way through the dark streets, I realized that I was unsteady, drunk. I shivered and felt damp, my teeth chattered and I started running, or at least tried. The snow on the lawns was deep, and I struggled with one lunge after another, happily laboring along. After a few yards, I felt warm again and the world seemed amazing. The lights of the houses reminded me of the illuminated windows in the Advent calendar my mother placed in the front hallway every Christmas. As I walked, the stars trembled brightly above me. The world seemed to spin faster, lurching anxiously into the night, yet I didn’t feel any closer to home. It was fine to be stuck in time when I was with Anna, but my nose and face, feet and hands were cold and I wanted to get to my bed, crawl in and go to sleep. I ran down the streets and cut through lightless yards, gaining some time; the pace made my head lighter and my legs weaker. The snow suddenly rose in front of me and I realized I had fallen. Snow had gone into my mouth and nose, and I sat up and laughed. I called Anna. “You should be out here with me. I’m rolling around in the snow like an idiot all by myself. You got me this way, you should be here taking care of me. It’s no fun out here alone.”
She laughed at me. “We can’t be together all the time,” she said.
“Why not?”
“It’s just not possible. I have things I have to do on my own. So do you.”
“No I don’t.”
“You got along fine without me before,” she said.
“You don’t know how untrue that is.”
“Well, you never know, you might have to again.”
“Don’t even say that as a joke,” I told her.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up. I picked myself up and ran into the darkness.
I was sitting on the floor of my room when my mom came in. She wasn’t happy. “I shouldn’t have to tell you to take your shoes off when you come in the door,” she said. I had forgotten. It had never entered my mind. She stood there glaring at me as I tried to take off my boots. They were dripping melted snow onto the floor. They didn’t have much o
f a tread. How much of a mess could they have made? My hand kept slipping off the heel as I tried to pull my right boot away from my foot. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t coming off, until I saw that I hadn’t untied it. I pulled slowly on the lace, and the brown string stopped in a knot. I had a hard time picking the knot loose. My mother was still watching me. She didn’t say anything. At first I was glad, and then I became angry. I wanted to yell at her. “You know I’m drunk, and you’re not saying anything!” I tried to say, “I’m sorry,” meaning about the boots, but my tongue had gone to sleep; it felt as if it had been shot full of novocaine. Finally I got both boots off and put them on a T-shirt on the floor. My mother glared at me for a last time, then left the room. I immediately wanted to tell Anna about it, so I went to my computer. I saw that she had sent me an e-mail:
Here’s a poem by Charles Baudelaire. It’s good advice for you. Get Drunk:
Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c’est l’unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.
Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.
Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d’un palais, sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge, vous répondront: “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer! Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.”
She knew that I couldn’t understand French (and she couldn’t either, as far as I knew), but she left it to me to translate.
carl is dead
“Why don’t you write Carl’s obituary?” she said. I didn’t want to. “Come on,” she said. “I need it for my notebook. You know him better than I do. You can do a better job than I can.”
In the end, I wrote it. I wrote it twice. In the first one, I had him dying old and rich, after a happy life with plenty of money and no worries. He was married and lived in a big mansion, and was friends with everyone. Anna didn’t like it.
“It’s not very interesting,” she said. “There’s not a lot of detail either. I mean, it could be anybody’s. Tell me about Carl. Make it interesting. Make him interesting. And have him die young. Like now. Write an obituary as if Carl died now.”
thanksgiving
Christmas has the Grinch and Scrooge. Thanksgiving has my father. He hates it. It doesn’t make sense, I know; I mean, what is there to hate? There’s food and football, and both in abundant quantities, but he hates it anyway. Usually it wasn’t so bad, because there would be enough people around that his bah-humbug behavior didn’t stand out so much, and if he wasn’t complaining, he was holed away in his den and we wouldn’t give him another thought. My brother would cook the turkey. It’s something he started in college. He and his friends would come and cook a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Paul continued even after he married, but he and his family were not coming this year. They were staying down in Baton Rouge.
We went to the club. My father was a member of the country club in Hilliker, and that’s where we wound up for the holiday. It had a large ballroom, with enough tables to hold a few hundred people. All the tables had white cloths draped over them and an arrangement of dried flowers in the center. Almost every table had eight people, or ten, or more, large families laughing and eating and enjoying themselves. It was just the three of us at our table, sitting silently by ourselves.
The ballroom looked out across the golf course, covered now in a few feet of snow. My father stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stared out into the snow, then finally sat down with his back to the window. I’m surprised he didn’t go out with a shovel and clear the course, just so he wouldn’t have to eat with us.
The waiters and waitresses, in starched white shirts, wheeled a turkey right to your table and carved it with a showy flourish; they also brought huge platters of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and green beans. There was a buffet where you could fill up on appetizers, soup and salad, bread, cheese, and dessert. It was a ton of food, and it was all good. My mother and I made trips to the buffet, but my father never left his seat. He sat and drank his scotch and had a look on his face like he had a big ball of mashed potatoes stuck in his throat. Men came and said hello to him, guys he golfed with or did business with, and he responded with a few words, but he never introduced my mother or me, and he kept the conversation as brief as possible. I didn’t know anyone there until I saw Billy Godley enter with his family, a big group of parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. His father was a cop, a detective, and that wasn’t the best for Billy. Kids made fun of him at school. He hung out with the geeks on the second floor. He was small and skinny too, which didn’t help. Billy was nice enough, but I wasn’t about to go talk to him. The two Velveetas weren’t going to have Thanksgiving dinner together.
“It’s good turkey,” I said to my mother. “Don’t you think?”
“It is good. Not as good as your brother’s, but it’s good.”
“Maybe we can get him to cook one at Christmas.” Paul had promised to come for Christmas. I didn’t think I could survive if he didn’t come.
My father was ready to go while we were still eating. “Have some coffee,” my mother told him. He got up from the table and wandered off. My mother and I went and got dessert. I think I had three pieces of pie. Still, it took only a little more than an hour to have Thanksgiving dinner.
Before we left I went to the bathroom. Someone had thrown up in one of the stalls, missing the toilet, and the chunks were all over the floor. There was the smell of vinegar and fresh-baked bread, the kind of smell that immediately stops you from breathing. I wondered if it had been my father.
He was sitting in the car. Just sitting. He didn’t have the radio on, he didn’t even have the heat on.
When we got home he made a beeline to his den, and my mother made a pot of coffee for herself. I tried calling Anna, but she must not have had her phone on. I sent her a text message and waited to hear from her. She and her parents had gone out of town for the day, to visit relatives or something; I don’t think she ever really said.
My brother called later that night. He talked to my mother for a while and then asked to talk to me.
“So how horrible was it?”
“It was all right,” I said. “Not as good as when you cook.”
“I’m sorry to do that to you this year.”
“That’s all right. You’ve got the baby and everything.”
“We’ll come up for Christmas.”
“That’ll be good,” I said. It was all done with anyway. I didn’t think the day had been so horrible, and at that minute I didn’t really care whether they came up for Christmas or not. If you’d asked me a couple of hours before, like when I was standing in the puke-covered bathroom, I would have cared. But right then I was more interested in looking at my phone and seeing if Anna was going to contact me that night. She didn’t.
The next day, Anna and I went sledding. She showed up at my house wearing black jeans and boots and her long black coat. I made her change into a pair of raspberry-colored coveralls of my mother’s. She hadn’t worn them in years. “Everything’s going to get wet otherwise,” I said. It was going to be a warm day, maybe even above freezing. I had on a pair of ski pants, and Anna asked me if I skied. “I know how,” I said. “Maybe we can go sometime.”
“Don’t push your luck,” she said. “I’ll be lucky if I survive sledding.” She came out of the bathroom and looked at the coveralls and said, “Can we go somewhere where there aren’t any
other people?”
There was a great sledding hill about five minutes from my house, just north on Lincoln Road, but everybody went there. So we walked east, down Valley View Road and then up Brook Road, with me dragging the two-person toboggan along the sidewalk. My brother and sister had used the same toboggan when they were little. It was still in good shape, although the padding had seen better days. It hissed as it skidded across the snow-covered lawns. The sky was cloudy and the air thick and moist. Sidewalks and streets were clearing as the snow melted, but the curbs were still piled with snow that had been pushed into dirty mounds by plows and browned by sand. I almost wished it would snow again to cover it all up and make it clean. Every once in a while we could hear sheets of snow slide down someone’s roof and hit the ground with a muffled thump. The daytime warmth wouldn’t last, though; everything would freeze again in the night.
We walked from Brook Road into the woods, and had to take a breather at the top of the steep hill. There was no one around, not even traffic on the road. A couple of hills here had been cleared in the past, for electric wires or something else that never came about, and they made for good sledding. It wasn’t as good as the Ashton hill, but it was good enough, and it wasn’t crowded like Ashton. My brother was the only other person I knew who had come up here. It’s where he brought me sledding when I was little.
A white slide stretched down before Anna and me, a wide trough of snow, bordered by thick trees. The trick was to stay in the middle of the slide, and not go into the woods.
Anna turned around and said, “This isn’t going to wind up like Ethan Frome, is it?”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was one of those references of hers that was lost on me.
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